It's more than process problems though, and really more than BK too. Intel was the proverbial termite-riddled house by the 2010s on multiple levels.
BK was COO from 2012 and CEO from 2013, and intel was already starting to spin its wheels by that point on stuff like modems and atom and wireless and lacked a proper strategic direction. It's hard to know how much internal jank was in the architectures back then but it probably wasn't insignificant, after all Core M ties back to Pentium III and P6/Pentium Pro at least.
He certainly didn't help anything but the organization that produced BK (he started as an engineer) and put him in the boardroom wasn't going to pick Lisa Su or Jensen Huang as plan B. The organizational forces that gave us BK would have put another suit in the chair and applied the same pressures to them, the problem with historical counterfactuals is always that these forces really matter more than specific individuals being in the chair in most cases.
People forget, he was literally a process engineer by trade too, it's not like he came in as a beancounter. That was all just natural pressures of the market.
On the other hand, if you count out 5 years from when he became CEO... that's around the time the problems started with 14nm (Broadwell struggled to be born) and the point where uarch performance progression really stalled out etc. And of course 14nm was followed by 10nm and the interminable delays.
But in hindsight a lot of the delays appear to have been "termite problems", yes the process was a mess but the IP teams couldn't get their shit together either, and that's why server products have been running 2+ years behind schedule, Alder Lake has its AVX-512 disabled, Meteor Lake is not happening on desktop, and 2.5GbE is going back for its... sixth stepping? Those teams are underperforming and it has nothing to do with 10nm delays.
I realize 2015-2017 is when shit started really hitting the fan but like, unless BK walked in on day 1 as CEO and was like "alright boys we're making Broadwell shitty and giving Skylake-X the worst AVX-512 implementation known to man" it's not entirely his fault either, just the termite rot was still not structural yet. Both the fab teams and IP teams were having visible problems already not too long after he took the chair.
He's not a great CEO by any means, and he actively made things worse over his tenure but... it's kinda hard to believe that he just actively made Intel shit in 4 years as CEO all by himself. They had to have had problems already, and some things like Pentium 4 and Meltdown (which goes all the way back to P6) point to that. But moore's law was the great equalizer back then... just right the ship and catch up on the next node and you'll be fine. Nodes are an active problem right now and it requires advanced packaging that is placing more emphasis on the architecture to cater around that. Things are just a lot harder now.
Alder lake has AVX-512 disabled because 512 bit data paths on atom cores don't make sense and Microsoft couldn't execute on a IHV specific scheduling change so quickly. AVX2+ and later Windows scheduler changes will take care of this. Just like P-states, Intel now has hardware scheduling hints for the OS as well.
> Meteor Lake is not happening on desktop
Because arrow lake is tracking closely within 6 months and MTL/LNL are focused on the platform power efficiency.
> Those teams are underperforming and it has nothing to do with 10nm delays.
It very much has to do with process nodes as well, with tight coupling of process to chip area (yield, thermals) and number of transistors.
I get that they aren’t making these chips for me, but Alder lake with AVX-512 would have been so cool, it would be like having a Phi in the same package as your main cores.
I’m not sure what exactly killed the Phi, but not having to talk through PCIe might have given them a chance to keep up with the inevitable march of NVIDIA Tesla bandwidth improvements.
BK was COO from 2012 and CEO from 2013, and intel was already starting to spin its wheels by that point on stuff like modems and atom and wireless and lacked a proper strategic direction. It's hard to know how much internal jank was in the architectures back then but it probably wasn't insignificant, after all Core M ties back to Pentium III and P6/Pentium Pro at least.
He certainly didn't help anything but the organization that produced BK (he started as an engineer) and put him in the boardroom wasn't going to pick Lisa Su or Jensen Huang as plan B. The organizational forces that gave us BK would have put another suit in the chair and applied the same pressures to them, the problem with historical counterfactuals is always that these forces really matter more than specific individuals being in the chair in most cases.
People forget, he was literally a process engineer by trade too, it's not like he came in as a beancounter. That was all just natural pressures of the market.
On the other hand, if you count out 5 years from when he became CEO... that's around the time the problems started with 14nm (Broadwell struggled to be born) and the point where uarch performance progression really stalled out etc. And of course 14nm was followed by 10nm and the interminable delays.
But in hindsight a lot of the delays appear to have been "termite problems", yes the process was a mess but the IP teams couldn't get their shit together either, and that's why server products have been running 2+ years behind schedule, Alder Lake has its AVX-512 disabled, Meteor Lake is not happening on desktop, and 2.5GbE is going back for its... sixth stepping? Those teams are underperforming and it has nothing to do with 10nm delays.
I realize 2015-2017 is when shit started really hitting the fan but like, unless BK walked in on day 1 as CEO and was like "alright boys we're making Broadwell shitty and giving Skylake-X the worst AVX-512 implementation known to man" it's not entirely his fault either, just the termite rot was still not structural yet. Both the fab teams and IP teams were having visible problems already not too long after he took the chair.
He's not a great CEO by any means, and he actively made things worse over his tenure but... it's kinda hard to believe that he just actively made Intel shit in 4 years as CEO all by himself. They had to have had problems already, and some things like Pentium 4 and Meltdown (which goes all the way back to P6) point to that. But moore's law was the great equalizer back then... just right the ship and catch up on the next node and you'll be fine. Nodes are an active problem right now and it requires advanced packaging that is placing more emphasis on the architecture to cater around that. Things are just a lot harder now.